POETRY · BIOGRAPHY
Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. - Wikipedia
My nature is the city.
— from Hail Babylon!, 1998
Most acclaimed
The Blood Countess
1995
Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary (1560-1613) was beautiful, well educated in the best traditions of the Renaissance, and wealthy beyond measure. Upon assuming her seat of power at the age of sixteen, the Countess set out upon a course of revelry and debauchery, aided by her spiritual adviser, Darvulia, and by her faithful bevy of overwrought maids. Eventually, time and an excess of increasingly bizarre pleasures led the Countess to fear the loss of her beauty. She was advised by her witches to take baths in the blood of virgins to regenerate her body. A long procession of young girls were "chosen" to spend the night with Elizabeth. Six hundred and fifty young women are said to have died in the Countess's castles. Countess Elizabeth Bathory's direct descendant, Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, is a Hungarian emigre living in New York near the end of the twentieth century. He considers himself a failure at life. His relationships with women have been disasters. He is haunted by the Hungary of his youth, which he had to flee during the Hungarian revolution of 1956. After the collapse of Communism, he returned to Hungary to find his youth, but found instead something a lot more horrifying: the pervasive presence of his ancestor, Countess Bathory. When he returns to the United States, he confesses to a hideous crime before a New York magistrate. This exquisite novel is told through Drake's eyes, as he searches for his roots and comes to terms with this gruesome part of his family history.
Thomas Mann
1967
Thomas Mann is a literary biography in the grand tradition by the acclaimed biographer of Proust, Sartre, and Kafka. Ronald Hayman offers the first complete portrait in English of the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist, and the first to draw on Mann's unexpurgated diaries. Thomas Mann, author of Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and Joseph and His Brothers, was a man with secrets. Ronald Hayman uncovers a brilliant writer's masks and brings to the fore the private man: his bisexuality, his obsession with "keeping up appearances," and the deep guilt feelings that plagued him for nearly fifty years. Hayman is the first biographer to show the extent to which Mann presented a sanitized self-portrait in his novels, stories, essays, photographs, public appearances, broadcasts, and articles. The world took Mann to be a self-controlled, elegant, dignified, supremely self-assured, rather aloof man. Wanting this image to survive his death, Mann incinerated most of his diaries and stipulated that the five thousand manuscript pages he had spared should be kept under seal for twenty years after his death. In reality, as these newly available diaries attest, Mann was subject to fits of nervous trembling, convulsive sobbing, and moments of sexual embarrassment. ("It can scarcely be impotence," he recorded in 1920. "How would it be if there were a young man at my disposal?") When his novels are reread in the perspective of the diaries, new meanings emerge, as do new interconnections between the problems of the characters and those of the author. As Hayman demonstrates in vivid and illuminating detail, Mann overcame literary inhibitions by speaking freely about his inner life through fictional characters apparently dissimilar to himself. As Mann once wrote to a friend, his trick was to find "novelistic forms and masks which can be displayed in public as a means of relaying my love, my hatred, my sympathy, my contempt, my pride, my scorn and the accusations I want to make.". Drawing on extensive research, including not only the as-yet-unpublished final volumes of Mann's diaries but also new interviews with Mann's children, Ronald Hayman moves behind Mann's public persona to bring forth startling reinterpretations of his novels, stories, and criticism, and to reveal an extraordinarily complex and often misunderstood genius.